Imposter's Gambit: A Space Opera Adventure (Delta Desperadoes Book 1), page 14
“He owes me a bike or two, so we can ride that out there,” she said. “I used to scavenge those kinda parts for him, before this sheriff—er, deputy—position came along. Wait, what am I, anyhow? Sheriff, or deputy? You deputized me and all, right?”
“Yes, but I need to make it official.”
“Yeah?” she asked, and the genuine curiosity on her face made him laugh.
Steelgrave hauled her bottom up to his face, and he kissed the area he’d pinched.
“There, Ori Jo. You’re officially my deputy now.”
“God dang you. I ain’t moving my rump, now ya gotta deal with it.”
“Suits me,” he said.
After their lovemaking, Steelgrave and Ori Jo slept in her bed together. The sandstorm had passed, but it was night, and he didn’t want to leave her side. The way she clung to him indicated that she agreed. He drifted off again, but the screen flashed with a new episode.
The vid queue played another Zoe Zeta adventure, one where the heroine unmasked a villain she had trusted.
He tapped the screen off and held Ori tighter.
11
“Only in complete silence will you hear the desert.”
- Bedouin proverb, pre-colonial Earth
Over the next two sols, Steelgrave and Ori Jo helped clean up Noia de la Flota after the sandstorm. It was the strongest squall of the season so far, registered with ninety-two kilometer gusts. The winds also brought more radiation: 9 mSv on the dosimeter outside the magistrate’s office. Though the reading gradually returned to normal levels after a few hours, he feared worse would come from the contamination’s source—House Sentiri’s uranium mines at Warui Kaigan.
His first instinct was this: why should he care? In a few sols, he’d be offworld.
But the way Ori smiled at him and hummed Zoe Zeta theme tunes to herself, the care she took with cinching the seals on his sleeves and pants to keep out windblown dust…he didn’t want to care about those things.
But he did.
After helping clear the streets of dust drifts, unclogging starship exhausts in the spaceport, digging out the elderly whiskey lady from an alley dumpster, stopping a rescue scam by Ramón and El Indio, and running off scavengers who tried to disassemble a tram car while the operators cleared the track, Steelgrave was ready for a break the next sol.
That night they were too tired for lovemaking, but Ori refused to climb off him as she fell asleep. Steelgrave played with her pigtails until he, too, fell prey to slumber.
The next morning, he suggested they relax, but Ori Jo would have none of it. She insisted they help clean the town’s solar panels. It took them most of the day cycle, but the townspeople brought them plenty of water, fried peppers wrapped in tortillas, tea, avocadoes smothered in bean chili, and wagashi filled with figs and chickpea paste.
While they were atop one of the pylons on a ladder, a gang of teenagers walked past and called Ori Jo ‘the marshal’s whore’.
She glared down at the youths, saying nothing—yet her right hand wandered too close to her holstered .45.
“Ori,” Steelgrave said.
“I ain’t gonna do nothing but scare them,” she said.
“Ori Jo.”
She tore her gaze from the laughing, retreating teenagers and stared at her shaking hands. Drops splashed her dusty gloves, and he realized she was crying.
Steelgrave finished swiping dust off the solar panel, descended the ladder, and waited for her to join him. It took her a minute as she furiously knocked the collected sand off the creaking panel. Once she came down, however, she looked around.
“They done gone?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She nodded, then grabbed him and sobbed against his chest.
He held her close and kissed her hair. After a few showers, the red dye in her hair was almost gone, revealing her cornstalk-hued tresses.
“Dontcha think I’m weak or some stupid silliness like that,” she said. “I had a bad moment, and that’s all that was.”
“We all have them, Ori.”
She looked up at him. “I wasn’t gonna shoot them. I wasn’t.”
“I believe you,” he said, then took a pigtail in each hand and wiped the corners of her eyes with the tips.
Ori Jo chuckled. “Dang you. I didn’t wanna laugh.”
“You needed it,” he said. “Ready to call it a sol?”
“I sure am, marshal.”
That evening, they ate the rest of the wagashi and went to bed early.
They did not sleep for a long time.
The following morning they prepped for the journey to El Agujero Muerto.
While she dressed, Ori Jo regarded him with a mixture of affection and anxiety.
“Today will be better,” Steelgrave said.
“Why ya say it like that?” she asked, buckling on her gunbelt.
“I don’t know, I suppose I worry about you,” he said.
She helped him put his duster on, then smooched him several times, all over his face. “You ain’t gotta worry about me, ya hear? But I’m worried I’ll run ya off or something. I ain’t no Homesteader woman, wanting a litter of kids and such.”
He grunted and put on his gunbelt.
She swallowed. “Hey, not that I wouldn’t mind something kinda like that, whenever…well, whenever. But I shouldn’t have to want kids, just because I’m a woman and all. Are ya okay with that? Wait, I’m getting away too ahead of myself. I talk too much, and--”
Steelgrave took her by the hand.
“Dang it,” she muttered. “Driving ya away already, ain’t I?”
“Promise me something, Ori.”
She kissed him again, a worried look in her eyes. “Anything, marshal.”
“Promise me you’ll never be anyone but yourself.”
She searched his face, as if fearing he was communicating something amiss, then she grinned. “Oh, I can make that there promise. Dontcha worry. If this here world ain’t beat me yet, nothing will.”
He put his hat on. “You only wear that outfit? I saw other clothes in your room.”
“Ya don’t like me in it?”
“Hold on, I didn’t say that,” he said. “But it isn’t you. It’s…well, it’s like a clay vase for some rare flower grown in a hydroponics dome.”
Ori snorted. “Wow, ya really know how to woo a gal, I’ll say.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean…I’m saying, you’re not that cultured, spoiled little flower. You’re not Zoe Zeta, who’s so perfect it’s silly. You’re more like a wild blossom that’s poked out of the ground, despite everything, and you’re all the more beautiful because of it.”
She looked at him as if she might faint.
“I’m just stupid, never mind,” he muttered as he put his gloves on.
Ori raced over and kissed him. “That’s how ya see me?”
“I…yes.”
She beamed at him. “You’re gonna make me fall for ya, ain’t ya?”
As she headed for the door, he felt even worse than before. He wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t develop any feelings for him. That he wasn’t staying on Pavo Dos. And that, even if she wanted, he shouldn’t take her with him.
She might be a wildflower, but he was like a beetle, chewing away at her until there would be nothing left but the stalk.
After a short disagreement, Ori Jo allowed Steelgrave to drive the one bike Thinktank grudgingly loaned them. She slung the .338 sniper rifle over her left shoulder.
“You’re a better shot than I am, so it’s better if you keep a lookout, and I drive,” he said once they left Noi de la Flota. “Besides, you’re toting that .338 like a proper badass, and I know you can use it.”
“Yep, I sure do, but ya still don’t know the way there, do ya?” she asked while sitting behind him, her hands dug into his gunbelt where she’d added three small medkits from the magistrate’s office.
“You’ll have to direct me, deputy,” he said, gliding across the pavement on a northwesterly route. “And if we’re lucky, Enitan won’t follow us.”
“Hmpf,” Ori Jo grunted in his ear. “I hear ya.”
He steered the bike along a path bordered with what might have been moisture collectors but were now rusted metal cylinders. They resembled a damaged cage, where animals had broken free and entered the wild.
“Ori Jo, I told you, I’m not on great terms with MEC, and this is a secret--”
She jabbed him in the right side. “I know you ain’t telling me everything. But I ain’t a caring at the moment. I wanna see Malvado’s gang taken care of.”
Steelgrave drove in silence. He needed Ori Jo. She was skilled despite her naiveté, she knew the region, and, well…she believed in him. The young woman might even love him. He hadn’t received that from another person in years. But those sentiments alone wouldn’t help him survive, nor would they help him defeat Malvado.
But the way Ori hugged him from behind made the ride a little easier.
They donned their masks and goggles as the morning’s heat rose. The air was more stifling than what he’d breathed at the Blood Buttes, even through his mask. As they ascended onto a series of mesas connected by old concrete suspension bridges, the air quality worsened. They passed two broken cyclers, each towering a hundred meters, their dead spires poking at the sky.
Steelgrave imagined they’d ceased functioning due to gang warfare or local shenanigans, but he suspected they’d suffered the same fate as most of MEC’s colonial technology: it had worked for a time, then failed, never to be replaced. Instead of repairing them, settlers had developed other ways of living on Pavo Dos, like masks, interior filters, or cheap offworld drugs meant to acclimate settlers to the climate. Often those drugs poisoned or mutated people - or drove them insane.
He thought of the crazed Necros they’d fought. Hunger and ideology could drive one to atrocities, but those things took time. Drugs were much faster and far cheaper.
“Is there any sort of drug trade here on Pavo Dos?” he called over his shoulder.
“Always, marshal,” she said in his ear. “Hey, don’t tell me ya wanting some of that nasty stuff? I ain’t gonna be your woman—er, deputy—for long if you take up hookahs or that spacer doodah.”
“Doodah?”
“Ya know, that weird stuff they smoke and shoot up,” she said. “Starry? Star Io?”
“Starrio,” he said, recalling the pack he still had in his duster pocket.
“Yeah, sure, I reckon that’s it. I ever see you hitting that stuff, we’re done.”
“It’s not for me,” Steelgrave said. “I’m still trying to figure this place out. Where there’s drugs, there’s money—and assholes who aren’t afraid to hurt others to get it.”
“Oh,” she said, then squeezed him from behind. “Gotcha.”
“So, you’re my woman, now?” he asked.
“Deputy,” she said, then drew out each syllable. “Deh-pew-tee.”
He laughed, even after she jabbed him again.
Once they’d traveled eighteen kilometers, Steelgrave stopped the bike atop the tallest mesa in the area. Ancient lava flows had striated its sides into the semblance of giant, dark veins. Rising six hundred meters above the flats, it offered a dazzling view of the surrounding farms and settlements. He pulled out the binoculars Thinktank had provided, scouting for the fort where Malvado was supposed to be hiding.
“Those flats down there are swampier than those I’ve seen to the east,” he said. “Did an aqueduct burst somewhere close?”
“No, that there’s the Shitter,” Ori Jo said.
Her childhood home. He wished he hadn’t asked.
“Ah,” he said, then lowered the binocs and gave her a look. “Sorry.”
She shrugged, her pigtails blowing in the breeze. “Ain’t nothing but memories now, marshal.”
Another sweep of the binocs revealed numerous camps, wells, and hydroponics domes that resembled cracked mirrors on the yellow-brown plain. Tiny shapes designated trees that had survived decades of wind erosion, now little more than matchsticks. Dilapidated barns leaned at unsafe angles due to cheap framing, defying Pavo Dos’s elements in some mad bid to remain relevant.
One mesa above a gulch caught his eye. After refocusing the binocular’s lenses, he made out buildings atop the squat formation. Farmer ruins, mostly, but something gleamed on those heights. Perhaps a starship hull?
“Marshal, I know you’re a trying to do something good on this here little world,” Ori said. Her mask made her sound like a milkmaid robot from a sots & bots robo beer vid. “But I know helping out Miss Julia Sentiri ain’t gonna lead to anything good.”
“Julia gave us the info, and now we’ll choose what to do with it,” he said. “Malvado, as I understand it, has been preying on Noia for months now. He’s in league with pirates and smugglers, but starves your town--”
“It ain’t mine,” she said. “Least, not like the way you say it.”
“Ori, those were just teenagers,” he said. “Assholes, yes, but teenagers.”
“What if all them other people think of me that way?”
He turned in the bike seat, so she had to withdraw her hands from his belt where she’d been holding on. Her goggles, though orange-tinted, still allowed him to see the fury in her eyes.
“Spill it,” he said.
She looked off into the distance, where low-hanging clouds gathered above the flats. “My daddy’s buried down there, in a grave nobody visits. Not too far from where I used to shoot them little targets with a pistol that I, uh, borrowed from…anyhoo, after our farm filled with that sewage mess, that’s when I went to scavenging.”
He waited for her to finish. Although the sun was scorching them, and they only had so many O2 packs for their masks, he sensed she had kept so much inside over the years, and only now could put it into words.
“But see here, I need to know why Malvado helped Karl Bauer do that,” she said. “Why he turned on us. He was sweet on my momma, I think, but Homesteader women are sweet on everyone, if ya take my meaning. She wasn’t any whore, either, but...”
“I know how Homesteaders are, and that’s their business,” Steelgrave said. “So this is revenge against Bauer and Malvado?”
Her scowl showed through the goggles. “I call it justice.”
“Why?” he asked. “You said your mother left years ago, your father is gone, and your farm is a poisoned mire. Why waste time worrying about it now?”
He knew it sounded harsh, and started to apologize, but Ori Jo played with the pouches on his belt, a convenient distraction for her nervous energy.
“This world would be better off, marshal,” she said. “Without him on it.”
“Killing him won’t change anything,” he said.
Ori ceased fidgeting and stared. “Then why’re you gunning for Miss Julia Sentiri, then? A lawman. You really so soup-sopping poor that ya need her money that bad?”
His hands tightened on the handlebars. “I don’t know what I need anymore.”
“Ya sure needed a deputy the past three nights,” Ori Jo said too quickly.
“That bothers you?” he said, and regretted the invective in his voice.
She crossed her arms and looked away. “Nope.”
He picked at the peeling rubber on the handlebars, then turned in the seat again.
“Ori?”
Still gazing at everything but him, she crossed her arms tighter. “What?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just…damn it. Look, I’ve never had such a loyal, dedicated, skilled, determined…deputy before. I don’t take anything that you’ve done for me lightly. Anything, okay?”
He risked touching her shoulder, and she uncrossed her arms in a huff.
“Whatever ya say, marshal.”
“Besides, all of Julia Sentiri’s money can’t buy how much you’ve…helped me these last few sols.”
“You god dang right it can’t,” Ori Jo said, cramming her hands back into his belt.
Steelgrave laughed and started the bike’s engine.
“Why’re you laughing?” she asked, then laughed, too. “I’m not so jealous that I’ll shoot ya in the back or anything. You are the one driving this here contraption. Rather well, actually.”
“So you’re not jealous?” he asked over his shoulder as they sped across the mesa.
She clasped his belt tighter. “You shut up and drive, mister.”
The next bridge spanning the mesas was barricaded with old vehicles, starship crates, broken moisture collectors, and anything else the bandits could cobble together to keep people from using the overpass. It was at least five hundred meters off the plain, and sixty meters long. There was no way across without dealing with the bandits—and Steelgrave didn’t have the time, fuel, or oxygen to reroute and reach the fort another way.
Six people watched them from the barricade. Arrogance showed in their cocky stances, their avoidance of cover.
He slowed the bike. “Malvado’s people?”
“Yep,” Ori Jo said.
Unlike the bandits he’d met so far, these looked seasoned. They wore a variety of clothing: jumpsuits, overalls, or tattered spacer MPSs so tight they might as well have been naked. Such attire was augmented with scarves or cloaks to keep out the dust. Some sported armor fashioned from scrap metal or pieces taken from magistrates that used to protect the settlers. The guns on their hips looked too new for a group of backwater bandits: Dokor .380s, Toshiro bullpup-style shotguns, 5.56 assault rifles.
Arms smuggling was a Dust Systems tradition.
Death from gunshots, even more so.
“Gotta pay the toll,” a man called, his mask bearing an amplification device.
Steelgrave noted the positions of their potential opponents. Two moving out front, and four atop the barricade. There might be more people past the barrier.
“Marshal?” Ori asked in a whisper that sounded like a scratch through her mask.
“When I signal…floor it.”
“Are you crazy?” she asked. “And you’ll really lemme do that?”
He got off the bike but left the engine running. “What’s the toll?”
